(Deroy Murdock, Headline USA) Ding dong, DEI is dead! But what will replace it?
Democrats will try to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. But the Left is unlikely to reverse the fatal blow that President Donald J. Trump dealt this system of state-sponsored racism, as Fox News anchor Will Cain correctly describes it.
Fetishistic, twisted, and cruel programs such as these are now kaput:
- PBS allocated $1.3 million to “allow indigenous journalists to challenge existing narratives about climate change.” Cecilia Loving, the network’s recently resigned senior VP of DEI, launched “indigenous healing circles.” According to the Free Press’s Josh Code, an internal 2023 presentation explained that “the vulnerability, intimacy, and trust developed through the safe container of circles supports our endorphin system, which in turn stimulates more trust.”
- Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency unearthed $101 million in US Department of Education DEI grants including one for “faculty workshops titled ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum.” Another aimed to “help students understand/interrogate the complex histories involved in oppression, and help students recognize areas of privilege and power on an individual and collective basis.”
- A “vast DEI bureaucracy” within the US military has promoted “race- and sex-based scapegoating and stereotyping,” reports Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions.
- MaineHealth hospital DEI executive Ryan Polly hosted an “antiracist prayer” in 2023. He beseeched fellow Caucasians to apologize for being white and “challenge the systems that have been designed to give us the advantage and oppress everyone else.”
Trump’s Jan. 21 executive order buried these racist shenanigans.
“Longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” Trump’s order began. “As President, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans.”
Trump then lamented that DEI policies “not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
Also, Disney, Harley-Davidson, Walmart, and other companies are pounding private-sector nails into DEI’s casket.
So, what will replace DEI or, more accurately, outlive its demise?
“Assuming Trump’s order to abolish DEI programs survives judicial challenges, the various civil rights acts Congress has passed will remain in force,” predicts Dr. Roger Pilon, the Cato Institute’s Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies. “What will end is the discrimination those DEI programs entail—in the name of anti-discrimination.”
“The end of DEI heralds the return of meritocracy,” says Horace Cooper, a fellow co-founder of Project 21, the black-conservative network. “Smart blacks, browns, and whites need not fear they won’t be allowed to achieve. A merit-based society is far from the return of Jim Crow. Jim Crow specifically stood for the notion that talent had to take a back seat to race. It was immoral, yes, but it was also inefficient because it precluded on the basis of race individuals regardless of how capable they were. America’s Golden Era absolutely requires a full-throated embrace of merit. I, for one, welcome it!”
“The near disappearance of deliberate, invidious discrimination against legally protected classes gave rise to the DEI complex in the first place,” explains the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, author of the jaw-dropping jeremiad When Race Trumps Merit. “If actual, invidious discrimination were such a problem, the race hustlers would not have found a substitute for it. Real discrimination will remain illegal and actionable — if anyone can find it.”
As DEI is lowered into its grave, the civil rights protections secured by the Freedom Riders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other heroes of Black History Month will keep protecting genuine victims of actual discrimination, whenever they emerge.
Meanwhile, Americans can wish a fond “Good riddance!” to DEI’s obsessive, relentless clawing at this country’s racial wounds, so that they never heal.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.
